Content Marketer or PR Pro? How You Can Learn From Each Position

If you’re thinking public relations, congratulations you’re right! But wait… if you guessed content marketing, you’re also right.

Content marketing and public relations are more similar than you think. The same principles that help PR professionals thrive can help lead to sustained success in content marketing, which might be critical to your brand’s survival.

Here are a few ways you can adopt strategies from each of these fields to make a difference.

Know how to talk to your audience

In public relations, your team knows the target audience better than anybody else. That’s why ensuring relevant details resonate with your target audience is such a big component of the job. In content marketing, you’re in the driver’s seat controlling the messaging and speaking the language of a brand.

You can take a page out of the playbook for each of these positions by noting how a brand’s message will be received by a target audience. Think about how things like tone and the story’s message will be received — are there any areas that need to go by the book? Any areas you can experiment with?

Another good way for PR pros and content marketers to understand an audience is to monitor analytics. Platforms like Google Analytics can track your following, determine your source of traffic and identify the most successful categories of content. These statistics can then be used to adjust your future content marketing strategy.

Bring your brand message to life

Your job in public relations is to cultivate the right relationships and drive your brand’s message forward. In content marketing, the end goal is the same, but the methods of getting there are slightly different. When producing content, you want to insert your brand’s messaging subtly to maintain their authentic image.

Both positions can learn from these methods. For PR pros, it’s a good idea to note how the content is bringing obvious value to your audience — this will help you craft a pitch that will position your story positively and affect the bottom line. Content marketers should keep in mind that the client’s goals and the PR team’s goals are one in the same: exposure. By creating a message with this in mind, the communications you craft for a client will be pitch-worthy right off the bat.

Relationships matter

To be effective in PR, you need to learn how to rise above the noise and make your story heard. How is your story unique to the countless others out there? PR pros do this by developing and maintaining relationships with the media. These personal relationships help them anticipate journalist’s needs and target them effectively with the right stories.

The same is true for content marketers. There’s no sense in taking the time to produce original content if you send it off into cyberspace to never be seen. But content marketers aren’t targeting media to share their stories, they’re sharing stories themselves and through nontraditional influencers like YouTubers, bloggers and Instagram stars. These influencers produce content that their followers trust.

Relationships are key for both jobs. By noting up-and-coming media outlets, PR pros can start to build relationships in new, diverse settings. Content marketers can even take the PR networking tactics and apply them to their influencers to gain exposure.

It’s often said that two minds are better than one. Thinking like both a PR pro and a content marketer will allow you to see how the similarities in these positions can be applied to your brand and change the way (for the better) you deliver your message.